How a clever little idea (one you can adapt & copy), put an awful lot of ‘doggies in the window’…

Today I’d like to share with you a very positive little story that my Head Minion unearthed whilst doing research for something rather clever he’s working on regarding social media (more on that another time)…

This story involves an animal shelter and the current phenomenon regarding ‘Pokemon GO’. For those unfamiliar with Pokemon GO, it basically involves wandering round with your face stuck to your phone hoping to catch ‘virtual’ monsters in specific, real locations.

As you can probably guess, this isn’t exactly my specialist subject – and probably isn’t yours either – but this story provides us with a fantastic example of how some ‘out of the box’ thinking can really turn a phenomenon like this to your advantage.

An animal shelter in the US starting posting a few local ads which said something along the lines of ‘if you are an adult and are a bit embarrassed about playing Pokemon GO, we’ll rent a shelter dog to you for $5 an hour so it looks like you’re actually walking a dog’.

Quite a clever little idea, you’ll agree … and one that got some quite incredible results:

The animal shelter now has a massive waiting list of people willing to pay to walk one of their dogs.

The shelter has now made so much money in ‘rental fees’ that they have been able to entirely waive adoption fees.

When the people who have rented the dogs are out walking they have posted pictures of themselves doing so on Facebook or Instagram … other people seeing the posts are then contacting the shelter asking to adopt the dog their friend was walking.

On more than one occasion, the people doing the ‘renting’ have found they bonded with the dog so have adopted it – even though they didn’t know they wanted a dog.

This has all resulted in so many adoptions that the shelter now has no dogs available to ‘rent’ and there is a waiting list … so they are currently bringing in dogs from other local overflowing shelters so they can be ‘rented’ and ultimately re-homed.

Although I’m sure very little of what we are doing online can directly ‘piggyback’ quite so easily off this particular trend … you do need to remember, it’s just a trend, and there will be another one along soon.

Before you know it, something just as popular as chasing virtual monsters will become the ‘must have’ or ‘must do’ thing and when it does, make sure you take notice and see if there is any way you can use it to cause the same kind of massive growth in your business.